Volatile single mom linked to biker deaths

Butchering an elderly couple who happen to be biker elite in the sanctity of their ultra-bourgeois floating home generally leads to trouble.

Anything Dave Wakeland touches is trouble. He invites trouble. He craves trouble. He is trouble.

Vancouver private investigator Wakeland can’t (for reasons the plot unveils) turn down the pleas of his former lover to help her client, a tough, violent single mother well-known to police who seems to be a slam dunk for the murders.

A mysterious witness places her at the scene, the blood-drenched murder weapons are found at her place, she has no alibi, she has motive and vowed vengeance for the murder of her brother.

Not that Wakeland is all that concerned about her beating the rap at trial — it’s keeping her alive, so she gets her day in court.

The bikers in this case being the terrifying Exiles who run much of the crime in glitzy yet seedy Vancouver — they don’t buy that the woman was framed, they have their own justice system, there’s nowhere they can’t reach.

And anyone who gets in their way or even comes sniffing around — well, you know the consequences in these kinds of murder mysteries.

That Wakeland is a first-person narrator isn’t totally a guarantee he’ll survive.

This is author Sam Wiebe’s sixth superb novel in the growing sub-genre of Vancouver noir and the fifth to feature Dave Wakeland.

Wakeland is a tough guy, but morose, lonely, likely depressed. He’s a sad piece of just-getting-by human being.

It would be easy to characterize The Last Exile as a version of the last-century Mickey Spillane novels without the misogyny, but there’s a lot more to Wakeland than there ever was to Mike Hammer.

There aren’t many laughs in Vancouver noir.

For all the magnificent ocean and beaches and mountains and trendy areas, Vancouver is a dingy, dirty place, where the gap between the obscenely wealthy and the ordinary hard-working people is growing almost exponentially. Drug addiction, poverty, homelessness, enormous condos sprout up in once-vibrant working class neighbourhoods; if it’s not evil developers (redundancy alert) with their political (and bought) allies sucking people dry, it’s gangsters or bikers feeding.

Wakeland isn’t all that heroic a figure. He put his own sister in prison, left his security business partner in the lurch, walked away from a woman who loved him, is estranged from his racist mother and is hated by the police for whom he briefly carried a badge.

And yet….

You knew there had to be an “and yet,” didn’t you? Wakeland has a sense of honour, an empathy for the weak and persecuted, for anyone who’s been done wrong. He isn’t a Jack Reacher or some Charles Bronson or Jason Statham vigilante who arms to the teeth and sorts the villains — he bleeds, he feels pain, he’s genuinely afraid of the Exiles, he can fail.

Wiebe’s book isn’t for everyone. The Last Exile is violent, though Wiebe doesn’t revel in the violence — maybe your cynicism about life in Vancouver doesn’t extend as far as the author’s. Maybe you’re a developer or a biker.

The Last Exile is a great murder mystery. And it’s Canadian.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin has been to the mainland once since moving to Esquimalt. He didn’t disrespect anyone while in Vancouver. He thinks he didn’t. He’s pretty sure he didn’t. He really, like really, hopes he didn’t…